Need help finding comprehensive documentation on Office Integration MDG

[Richard Freggi]

So I googled and searched the Sparx website for full documentation of the Office Integration MDG, but all I could find was promo brochures and youtube video "Integration of Microsoft Office and Enterprise Architect" that had a very cursory introduction.
I am now trying to reverse engineer how to set profiles and template documents for Excel import of classes, attributes and associations, each with their notes; and it's hit-and-miss, I'm guessing (often wrong) how to set profiles and worksheets up.  If anyone has some good documentation on how to do it please share thanks!!!

[Modesto Vega]

Have you gone through the reference in this page https://sparxsystems.com/resources/webinar/release/mdg-integration/mdg-office.html.

it's hit-and-miss, I'm guessing (often wrong) how to set profiles and worksheets up.

Last time I used it was indeed very hit and miss.

[Richard Freggi]

Thank you very much Modesto, that page was very helpful, and also somehow omitted to mention that there's a HTML user guide installed in the Windows Program data / MDG folder!  I really think that should be mentioned SOMEWHERE in the Sparx website!  I found out by rereading the comments on the Youtube video.  I'm going thru the HTML guide, seems has the details I need.

Thanks again for your help Modesto.

[Paolo F Cantoni]

Thank you very much Modesto, that page was very helpful, and also somehow omitted to mention that there's an HTML user guide installed in the Windows Program data / MDG folder!  I really think that should be mentioned SOMEWHERE on the Sparx website!  I found out by rereading the comments on the Youtube video.  I'm going thru the HTML guide, seems has the details I need.

Thanks again for your help Modesto.

Hi Richard,

When you've got some sort of working example can you let us in on the secrets?  I had a quick play with the Visio part to the MDG and was less than impressed.

TIA,
Paolo

[Richard Freggi]

For now I need help to uninstall Office MDG integration!
I installed both the 32 and the 64 bit versions of the MDG (seems like my company is using win 10 but with office 32 bit), and the profile editor I'm getting is different from what the user guide and the youtube video shows, so maybe reinstalling would help...  anybody knows how to delete completely?

p.s. It's a bit conky because the Office MDG does not show up in the Manage Technology or Manage Add-Ins windows, if it's an MDG I should be able to activate and deactivate it via the MDG Technologies window?

pp..s. "There's a HTML user guide installed in the Windows Program data / MDG folder!  I really think that should be mentioned SOMEWHERE in the Sparx website!  I found out by rereading the comments on the Youtube video.": I just realized that it is the MDG help menu launched via the ribbon...  duh.

[Modesto Vega]

You should see it under Apps & Features as a separate programme.

Never found the help too helpful. In particular, I seem to remember that to import from and export to excel I needed to 2 profiles (one for the import and another for export). For some reason, if I used one profile I seemed to end up with a big mess.

[Richard Freggi]

You should see it under Apps & Features as a separate programme.

Never found the help too helpful. In particular, I seem to remember that to import from and export to excel I needed to 2 profiles (one for the import and another for export). For some reason, if I used one profile I seemed to end up with a big mess.

Yes installation and use has been clunky and unnecessarily complicated.  Also the spec says that you can import hierarchy of elements but it seems to support only 1 level, i.e. I can import packages and classes within their package but it's impossible to import the class attributes at the same time. 

My experience is that if I deviate even a little from what is shown in the Youtube video or in the help html, I'm in the jungle and need a few hours of trial and error to make anything work.  By contrast I tried Geert's free Excel importer and it worked right away for several layers of hierarchy no problem.

The biggest weaknesses in this MDG so far:
- Very unique installation and handling: does not show up in the MDG menu ("Configure - manage technology"), apparently no way to unistall from EA (may just delete the folders but they are spread about the Windows directory, and good luck with unistalling from Office and Registry)
- Only works for *eap repositories apparently, at least the Office application menus
- It's almost impossible to get the Office template AND the profile AND the source document perfectly OK, there are dozens of things you can do wrong in each one of them, the chance of getting everything 100% perfect is almost zero and the documentation is insufficient
- Haven't been able to import class attributes yet, maybe it's my fault
- There are import / exports menus in both the Office applications (Excel, Word etc.) and in EA, the wizards are quite similar and the documentation almost never tells you which one it's showing, so you have to flounder trying this and that until MAYBE you get something that works

I have not completed my evaluation but definitely for a $140+ plugin it's hard to justify.  Most likely I will need to figure out how to unistall cleanly from my machine before the evaluation ends, anyone knows how to do that?

p.s. EA build 1310 on Windows 10 professional

[qwerty]

The vendor should know...

q.

[Richard Freggi]

The vendor should know...

q.

Yes you would think they would put it in the documentation somewhere....

[Modesto Vega]

The MDG has not been updated since 2018, either the vendor thinks it is perfect (and it clearly is not) or it is a marketing trick to tick a box.

I have always thought that Sparx could vastly improved their import/export capabilities.

If I find time I can try to find out the profiles I create when I looked into this and see if attributes and complex hierarchies can be imported.

[Arshad]

So I googled and searched the Sparx website for full documentation of the Office Integration MDG, but all I could find was promo brochures and youtube video "Integration of Microsoft Office and Enterprise Architect" that had a very cursory introduction.

If you have got MDG Integration for office installed on your machine you can find the details  from the the below path

Sample Predefined Profiles:(This will be encrypted) but can be viewed in Manage Profiles of MDG Integration Office Addin
C:\ProgramData\MDG Integration for Microsoft Office\Excel\Profiles

Sample Documents (for which sample profiles were created ) :
C:\ProgramData\MDG Integration for Microsoft Office\Excel\Sample Documents

Help document : ( This can be opened directly from UI by clicking help button)
C:\ProgramData\MDG Integration for Microsoft Office\Help Document\UserGuide
 

[timoc]

The MDG has not been updated since 2018, either the vendor thinks it is perfect (and it clearly is not) or it is a marketing trick to tick a box.

I have always thought that Sparx could vastly improved their import/export capabilities.

If I find time I can try to find out the profiles I create when I looked into this and see if attributes and complex hierarchies can be imported.

I too have noticed it is more trouble to use than other similar extensions i have tried. I originally had hopes of mining existing documentation to build a repository, also possibly having a round trip workflow with design documents. I have not yet been able to do anything usefull with it yet. Has anyone had a experience with excel and word? can they share?

As it is one of the two features that make the difference between Corprate and Ultimate edition tier payments, it should be more than a checkbox. I should have thought it would be able to do more, like supporting Office365 online by now...

[Sunshine]

I too have noticed it is more trouble to use than other similar extensions i have tried. I originally had hopes of mining existing documentation to build a repository, also possibly having a round trip workflow with design documents. I have not yet been able to do anything usefull with it yet. Has anyone had a experience with excel and word? can they share?

As it is one of the two features that make the difference between Corprate and Ultimate edition tier payments, it should be more than a checkbox. I should have thought it would be able to do more, like supporting Office365 online by now...

Funnily enough I've just used the MDG Office plug-in last Friday. I had an HR business process framework supplied to me in PDF form generated from another tool which had about 500 pages. I was asked to put it into Sparx EA. Should be easy enough I thought.
So changed to PDF to MS Word and attempted to import discovering the text did not use styles but just hard coded the font and colours. So first thing I did was automate searching through the document to replace the hard code text with header 1,2 3 etc.
Next I discovered the inconsistent use of tables prevented certain details being imported so I had to create another MS Word script to fix that. To cut a long story short I went through a lot of MS Word manipulation to successfully import the model elements and their text into sparx EA. The next thing I did was manually create the diagrams from the images in the MS Word document.
Took about 1.5 days of effort but beats having to manually create 1581 elements.
Moral of the story is to know how to automatically re-format MS word documents so they are in a decent state to import.
 

[qwerty]

I never saw anyone using Word with style (except you and you reading this). Only just like a typewriter with different fonts installed.

q.

[Paolo F Cantoni]

I never saw anyone using Word with style (except you and you reading this). Only just like a typewriter with different fonts installed.

q.

You never saw me either...  Over two decades ago, I had self-formatting documents as I typed,but it never took off.

Too bad everybody (±1%) sees it as a typewriter with different fonts.

Paolo